Penetrating, Knowledgeable, and Tenacious | Center for Equal Opportunity

I was asked by the Christian Science Monitor to participate last week in a discussion on “whether the US still needs affirmative action. Here’s what my coauthor and I had to say:

No: Racial discrimination is unfair to applicants and compromises quality at institutions.

It is very odd to ask, in 2012, whether it is a good or a bad idea for government to treat people differently — to discriminate against some and give preferential treatment to others — on the basis of skin color or ancestry. But this fall, that question is coming to Oklahoma’s state ballot and before the Supreme Court [in Fisher v. University of Texas, in which the school’s use of racial and ethnic preferences in admissions is being challenged by, among others, the Center for Equal Opportunity].

America is growing more and more racially diverse. Do traditional racial categories still make sense? Why lump all people of Vietnamese, Filipino, and Japanese ancestry under one broad stereotype — Asian — and treat them differently from individuals labeled Latino, who may be Mexican, Peruvian, or Cuban? The groupings become even more perverse when government tries to pigeonhole multiracial individuals into one ethnic category.

In the past 10 years, Americans who identify themselves as belonging to “two or more races” have increased 32 percent. There are now more “minority” babies than “nonminority” babies being born. Should an individual that is 1/32 Native American be hired over one who is 1/4 Asian, 1/4 black, and 1/2 Caucasian?

Proponents of racial preferences in university admissions claim they are justified because of the “educational benefits” of “diversity.” But evidence shows that, not only is there little or no benefit, but the costs are substantial — including the costs to African-Americans and Latinos who are “mismatched” with their schools and thus set up to fail.

Racial discrimination is unfair to applicants, compromises on quality for the institutions and people they serve, is divisive, and violates the Constitution and civil rights laws. The civil rights movement’s great accomplishment was to spotlight the evil of stereotyping according to race. In a society as diverse as ours, the only tenable system is one that treats everyone as an individual.

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Somehow, though, the Obama administration is apparently having trouble figuring this out. For example, the administration announced recently that it will need until after the election to decide if Arab Americans will be added to the list of groups eligible for services from its Minority Business Development Administration. This is the third extension on this matter by the administration. One analyst wrote about the issue earlier this summer,as did I. And, as I say, this latest extension will postpone the announcement of the administration’s decision until after the election. How convenient!

And don’t forget that the racial bean-counting feeds the soft bigotry of low expectations. There was a front-page headlinein the Washington Post last week that read, “New Student Goals Not Colorblind”; the story was about how some states are setting different math and reading proficiency goals for different racial groups, requiring less of African Americans, for example, than of other students. Yep, that’s creepy all right — and the Center for Equal opportunity has never been happy with the racial bean-counting in this area.

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We should mention that, along with the Fisher case, another top priority for the Center for Equal Opportunity this fall is the earlier mentioned Oklahoma Civil Rights Initiative — a referendum in that state that would put an end to preferential treatment on the basis of race, ethnicity, and sex in public contracting, employment, and education (including public universities). I wanted to flag that for you today, and we’ll be writing about it more in the weeks between now and the election.

And last but not least, we received a very nice compliment from Professor Carl Cohen in his article in the current Weekly Standard. The article is about the various amicus briefs that were filed in Fisher v. University of Texas, and Professor Cohen concludes, “Finally, there is the one brief that is most persuasive overall, that of the Pacific Legal Foundation, the American Civil Rights Institute, the National Association of Scholars, and the Center for Equal Opportunity, whose president, Roger Clegg, is the most penetrating, knowledgeable, and tenacious of all current opponents of race preferences.”

Wow—and thanks very much!

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